Plenty of Fish Dating Tips

Plenty of Fish Inbox Email Success Rates for Men

2011-12-20T15:29:00.002-05:00

For the average man who is first getting into online dating, particularly a free dating sites like Plenty of Fish, it becomes readily apparent that the email response rates from the dating messages you send out to women are atrociously low. Now some sites are better than others, for instance paid dating sites like Match.com or eHarmony may get you slightly better reply rates due to the fact that the members are more invested, however, if you're a cheap bastard like me, then it may get a bit frustrating logging into your Plenty Fish inbox only to see it completely empty after sending out a mass of emails to a bunch of women. Of course, being the numbers kind of guy I am, I thought it might be useful to find out what an average reply rate even is for a dating site like PlentyofFish. So I did a little number crunching; lets take a look.

First, lets take a look at the average number of first email messages sent out by each gender just so we have a starting point. Also, note that the following data for these charts was taken from a survey I ran on this site over the last two years which consists of 504 respondents who use Plenty of Fish; 219 which were male and 285 which were female.

Just to clarify, these figures represent the average range of emails sent per day per person broken down by gender. So for this chart, one could say that approximately 60% of men and women send between one to five emails per day while on POF.

As you can see, there isn't a whole lot of difference between the amount of emails that are being sent out compared to women. I'd dare to say, that this basically shows me that both genders are equally lazy about messaging potential dates. And as most of us men should know by now, is that online dating is largely a numbers game, thus it's vital to go beyond the 1-5 per day. Also, I'd like to take this time to point out that the "none" category is the second highest for both genders at around 20% of the respondents, which is astounding to me that these people don't do ANYTHING proactive to be successful on PlentyofFish. Although we'll move onto success rate in more detail with the next chart.

This above chart is breakdown of the men, their frequency of emails sent and the number of dates they went on as a result of the emails that they initiated. The chart might be a little confusing so to clarify, the vertical axis represents the number of men that fall into a particular category who sent out either: no messages, 1-5 messages, 6-10 messages, 11-20 messages or 21-50 messages per day. They are then grouped on the horizontal axis by the number of dates that resulted from their respective email message frequency.

So, looking at the first grouping in which men went on no dates at all, it shouldn't be surprising that a large number of those men either didn't send out any messages to prospective dates or sent very few messages with most of the men not sending out more than 5 email messages.

What I do find interesting is the second grouping of men who ended up on 1-3 dates from sending between 1-5 messages a day, which represent approximately 45 men of the 135 who send 1-5 messages a day. This shows me that even guys who are willing to put in minimal effort of initiating contact on Plenty of fish have a decent shot of getting a date.

Of course there are still a lot of guys putting in effort to send 1-5 emails per day and not getting anything out of it, which is definitely frustrating when looking into one's Plenty Fish inbox but from the little amount of data received from the guys sending out more than 10 emails per day, it does appear promising that increased frequency does indeed result in more dates.

Note: this post is part of the 19th Edition of the Carnival of Online Dating.

Lonely Guy Can't Get A Date on Plenty of Fish

2011-01-04T22:24:00.003-05:00

Just found this video of another guy ranting on about his woes and lack of success using Plentyoffish. It's kind of sad and I feel bad for the guy but from watching the video it's clear why he's not getting any dates from the site, which I'll explain afterwards, but first check out his video rant.

Wow, right? There's a number of things I could easily point out with this guy about his lack of success, so lets just get right into it, shall we?

1. Physical Appearance

This should be obvious to most people but if you're a 4 on the rating scale then you shouldn't be expecting to be snagging women that are an 8 or 9. It's just not realistic in terms of one's standards in the opposite sex. Of course, this is a shallow thing to say but the guy is not good looking and a bit unkempt. And as we know, online dating is much more shallow and based on looks than traditional dating methods. It's been said many times but much of online dating, particularly on free dating sites like PlentyofFish, your pictures are ninety percent of the game. If you don't have good pictures, where you make your best efforts to look good, then you will struggle to attract any attention.

Now, I'm not saying this guy is hopeless in terms of looks, in fact I think he could easily clean himself up and improve his attraction rating by at least 2-3 points, maybe more. If he got a decent haircut, shaved off that scraggly facial hair and put on some decent clothes he'd already be making some good progress short term then could improve even more by hitting the gym as a longer term goal.

2. Desperate Nice Guy Syndrom

In this guys video he professes many times that he's a "nice guy" that never cheats and treats all women with respect, bla bla bla... The problem here isn't that he's a nice person who is being ignored by women, the problem is he uses the Nice Guy facade as a disguise for his desperateness and lack of confidence. The whole video just oozes a desperate vibe, even towards the end when he actually asks for women to please contact him. I'm not saying he should be a jerk, a la the whole nice guy vs. jerk debate, but really he just needs some balls and stop acting like a dog begging for a bone.

To fix this, I think his first step would be to delete the damn video of him bitching about his failure at using Plenty of Fish to the entire world. Seriously, there's no need to exacerbate one's lack of confidence by publicizing it all over the place. Second, though more difficult is a change in mindset and attitude. Instead of coming from a place of neediness and despair, he needs to act as though he doesn't even need online dating, act as though it's just something he's messing around with. From my experience, women can smell needy guys from half way around the world (thanks to the interwebs) and will quickly put the guy on the Creepy Loser List.

So those are the main points but I think it's pretty clear why this guy isn't getting the results he wants and it amazes me that men are unaware of this stuff. However, obviously there are plenty of guys on Plenty of fish like this, a good example is another POF Youtube rant I posted about some time ago.

Of course I'm not the only pointing out these errors, as you can see in the next video from Player Supreme, he rips these guys apart on the same things that I just pointed out, though much more harshly.

Sample Online Dating Email Messages

2009-11-17T00:28:00.007-05:00

Lately I have been getting really good at having great flirty conversations on PlentyofFish. I've found that the most successful email message exchanges, regardless if I initiate contact with the girl or she does, is all about banter.

What do I mean by "banter?" Well to put it simply, it's a kind of humorous, playful, seemingly spontaneous conversation in which both parties are in good spirits. It is also kind of like teasing in a sense, you know, like when you were a little kid on the playground and that girl or boy would punch you in the arm for no reason, it's because he/she really had a crush.

I'd like to share one sample conversational email thread with a cute girl who had actually contacted me, asking a simple question about my dating profile, which is filled with interesting conversation bait as any good online dating profile should. The names and certain details have been changed to protect the innocent and not so innocent (I'll let you decide who's who:-). Also, I will be adding my own commentary afterward in the blue writing to explain what is going on in my diabolical mind.

Email Message #1: From Jane

I'm curious how your marathon went. Did you find minimal padding was ideal or were you aching afterward?
You seem very unique, and interesting.

~Jane

Now right off the bat, I have a cute girl contacting me all because I put in a ton of effort into my dating profile. There's all sorts of interesting stuff that I've written and re-written, one of which is about my running/marathon hobby that baits her into sending me the first email message. Also note that she calls me "unique" and "interesting" so you know that I've got her attention, which makes the whole process a heck of a lot easier.

Email Message #2: From Me

Hi Jane,

The marathon went well and though I was sore afterward, the recover was shorter than usual. I do believe that minimalist shoes allow your feet to move more naturally and is beneficial to creating a more efficient foot strike. I've done a lot research and self experimentation in this area; it's pretty interesting stuff. Are you a runner?

Also, I've been trying to figure out what the heck that costume is in the third picture of your profile... lion king outfit??? :)

-Matthew

Ok, there are two parts to this and both are pretty important. Most guys royally screw up here by either saying something sexually offensive or spilling their guts with a boring ass life story, possibly professing their love for this girl that they haven't even met.

First thing I did was to answer her question briefly but also in a way that shows I know a lot about my hobby, running, without being arrogant. Second thing I did was to make sure I ask her a question or two. This step is important because it allows her to easily continue the conversation and keeps things moving. Also, if you ask her a specific question about her profile, it shows that you actually read it and paid attention to something other than her boobs!

Email Message #3: From Jane

Amazing, but I suppose it shouldn't be so surprising. In high school I was forced to be a runner, and sort of continued after but to a much lesser degree.

I have nooo idea what it is, it has horns so maybe a mountain goat of sorts? I was in charge of organizing an attic full of costumes that the high school drama club and the local community theater uses and...that happened :-P.

~Jane

Ok good, she took the bait from the last email message and responds with some more interesting things about herself, yet still she doesn't do much to keep the conversation rolling, so in my next email I'll have to get more creative.

Email Message #4: From Me

Ha ha, well, whatever it is it's funny. You seem like you might be prone to getting into mischief... like the kind of girl who'd explore their parents' forbidden attic or that old creepy abandoned house down the street.

Pop quiz, where would you rather go exploring: a distant mountain range, a tropical paradise, a vast wilderness or the urban jungle of a foreign city?

Extra points for being creative:)

This is where I drop the bomb and go all in. This is what I like to call a qualifying email message. The reason it's called a qualifying message is because it's designed to elicit an answer that will allow me to either filter her out as a girl that is not my type or gives her a chance to show me that she is my type. Note that this is designed for me personally and would be different for other people based on whatever their preference in dating type.

Email Message #5: From Jane

A little trouble is good for the soul. I love abandoned houses, I just try to avoid the illegal actions (breaking and entering and such).

I love mountains, last month we went to trail days in damascus,va and that is a beautiful place to explore, but what's more interesting is digging through the people. There were so many different "types" of people all with fascinating stories. I adore cities also, back alleys and finding those amazing restraunts that no one else realize is there, or the authentic belly dance shop that draws you in (or whatever your passions may be at the time). I find it's a lot like antiquing, when you find something that looks like junk but inside is marvelous (I greatly enjoy going to garage sales like that too).

:-)

Wow, she sounds super awesome right? She really gets into it and was able to elicit a personal and emotional response. She is revealing stuff about herself that she wouldn't if she wasn't attracted and interested in meeting me. She passes the qualifying question and the only thing left to do is to put the nail in coffin and arrange the meet up.

Email Message #6: From Me

Wow, you are adventurous, I think we need to start an explorers club, what do you think? How about we make our first adventure to get some ice cream cones?

There's no need to keep the conversation now, the only goal is to get her number, real email or other contact information. Too many people get stuck in the online dating forever zone which seems to be a consistent problem. Your goal with online dating on sites like Plenty of Fish isn't to make a pen pal, it's to get dates in real life! So rather than let things fizzle in the virtual online realm, you need to move the interaction to an actual real date as soon as you've created attraction.

Email Message #7: From Jane

That would be great, you can call me this evening, here's my # (555) 555-5555

~Jane

It worked!!! Not only did it work but it was done in only 7 email messages. There you have it folks, one of my best examples/sample of successful online dating email messages from where else but the PlentyofFish dating site.

Vegetarian Singles vs. BBQ Singles

2009-11-10T22:26:00.033-05:00

Are you having trouble looking for dates with high I.Q.s and great bodies? Well, all you have to do is a search on your favorite online dating site for the word "vegetarian." Yup, that's it, one simple search for vegetarian singles and you easily narrow down the gene pool to the hottest and brightest. What's that? You think I'm full of crap? Well ok, this might be a little controversial but hear me out and let me tell you about my not so scientific research.

So there I was poking around my favorite free online dating site, PlentyofFish.com, when I stumble upon a little known component of the Plenty of Fish dating site. Buried in it's advertising section is a page in which you get a demographic breakdown of members based on the interests listed in peoples dating profiles. Yea I know, if you're a stats junkie like me this is a pretty sweet find.

Naturally, my curiosity got the best of me and I started plugging stuff in. For some reason the word "zombies" popped into my head and figured that was as good a place to start my search as any. This search brings up a whole statistical breakdown from gender, income ranges, education, marital status, height, body type and even drinking ability.

So lets see, people who are interested in zombies are mostly: males, making less than $25,000 a year, are big and tall/BBW, and drink more than 3 times a week. Awesome!

You might imagine how much fun you could have with this thing just plugging in random weird crap. For instance, did you know that people interested in necrophilia have a 300% divorce rate? Who would have thought that?!

Despite my juvenile usage of this neat Internet tool, I decided to put my mind to better use.

Recently I had an argument with a friend of mine which I declared that the overall population of vegetarian females was hotter than the overall population of omnivores. It was a heated debate and my friend being anti-vegetarian for some reason refused to believe my theory. In addition, I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how vegetarian dating should be one of the categories in which to filter potential dates by.

However, now I have a chance to somewhat prove my point. I did searches with the Plenty of Fish demographic tool for interests involving the words vegetarian and barbecue. I figured people don't write "omnivore" or "carnivore" in their interests section so I had to go with a more round about word, thinking that a majority of people who like "barbecue" are big meat eaters.

I plugged all the data from my searches into a nifty spreadsheet, made some graphs and this is what I got:

So as I suspected, a large majority of vegetarians are female, which shouldn't be much of surprise to anyone. Of course, men are all about the BBBQ's. For those Simpsons fans out there, you know what the extra "B" stands for.

The education level is certainly interesting, showing more vegetarians with higher levels of education. I'm not sure if this means that smart people are deciding to take better care of their bodies or whether eating a vegetarian diet makes you smarter. Either way there seems to be some correlation there.

Of course this was the graph I was most interested in. You see, I'm a bit of a drinker myself and it's important to me that I can drag my female dates out to my favorite watering holes with me. Even when I'm browsing chicks on the Plenty of Fish site, I tend to filter by drinking habits... is that wrong? Anyways, I'm a little disappointed to see that a large majority of the vegetarians on the site don't drink at all. Is there such a thing as being too healthy? Although, I suppose you could always use your date as a designated driver...

Last but not least, the characteristic that I'm sure most guys filter in their online dating searches is body type. Come on now, don't lie fellas, we know what's up. According to this chart, if you like thin, then you'll love dating vegetarian singles.

So there's your Online Dating Stats 101 course for the day. That is all.

10 F*cked Up Online Dating Stories

2009-11-03T21:18:00.011-05:00

Sure, plenty of people have found love on the Internet. Some find promiscuous flings. Some even end up getting married. This article isn't about those types of online dating stories. This is about those once in a life time circumstances, when the person you meet online turns out to be a compete disaster of an experience, you know, once that "real life" thing kicks in.

Without further ado, I present the 10 most F-ed up online dating stories you've ever heard.

1. Quasimodo Needs Lovin' Too

Bobby Finstock from the Pointless Banter blog has had plenty of adventures in the online dating realm and fortunately for us readers, they almost always end up in disaster.

In one of ole Bobby's finest intimate encounters, he provides us with his hilarious night with a girl/it that he dug up from the Adult Friend Finder site.

"When we got to the restaurant my “date” got of the car and walked liked Quasimodo half bent over. One of her legs was severely longer than the other, giving her a very interesting gait. We went into the restaurant and ate, while the conversation was good all I could think about was that she was freaking me out a little bit."

Read the Full Story

2. Your 7th Grade Teacher

So, there you are filtering through a bunch of skeevy emails from a bunch of skeevy dudes all thanks to a prank. This is what happens when your best friend decides to post a casual encounters ad for you on CraigsList. Well this exact story happened to one girl and what she found was pictures of her 7th grade middle school teacher in her inbox. Yea it was awkward when she called him out on it, but after he offered to send her MORE pictures, then it just turned out-right F'ed up!

3. So... What's Your Sign Again?

While perusing the Plenty of Fish forums (always interesting) I found this little gem of an online dating story:

"The saddest (therefore, worst since I find all women nice in some twisted way) was a woman who showed me her X-rays on the first date. And I offered to take her to the hospital the next day, and then to a doctor's office not far from the hospital. She had terminal cancer. I doubt if she is still alive. I suppose I was the last guy who treated her to Chinese take-out."

Yikes! Talk about a weird situation. Not that I'm making light of Cancer or anything, but man that's one hell of a first date to deal with.

4. Missed Connection or Just Missed?

This little tidbit I found on the You Suck at Craigslist blog, which is hilarious by the way. It's not exactly an Internet dating story, really more of an Internet dating fantasy. Because really, what's worse than a creepy guy sending messages on an online dating site than a creepy guy who fantasizes about dating then posts it online?

Read the blog post here.

5. The Handicapped Hater

E from Geek's Dream Girl shares one of her weirdest online dating stories. The guy is pretty normal at first but then he drops a prejudicial bomb on her. Nope, he's not racist, not homophobic, he's anti-handicapped.

"Now, I can understand hating racists, rude people, the willingly ignorant… but the handicapped have no choice in the matter. You choose to be racist. You choose to be willingly ignorant. You don’t choose to be an amputee."

Read the Full Story.

6. You Want Me to Drink What?!

Like the previous story, this guy turned out to be pretty normal at first, even offered to buy the gal a plane ticket to come visit him. Every thing went great on their dinner date, which eventually lead to kissing, and then to the bedroom. Unfortunately this is where things started to go downhill. Apparently the guy turned out to be a self-righteous douche-bag and the night ended with the following:

"Then he says, 'you know what, if you can do this little thing for me we will work out and you can have all the credit cards you want. DRINK MY PEE, baby.'"

Read the Full Story.

7. The Shark Attack Girl

The video speaks for itself.

8. Well, We're Not Blood Related...

So you meet a real nice girl online, you have great chats, she has a sparkling personality and for some weird reason you get along like you were family. Oh yea, did I mention neither of the two parties had pictures on their profiles... so you can imagine the awkward moment when you go out on your first date to meet your sister!

Now granted she was only his step sister but that's still a little weird, right? Well apparently she was into it!

Read the Full Story.

9. Would You Like Some HIV in Your Coffee?

This one is just truly scary. Imagine that you've found the love of your life through an online dating site. You are really sure she's THE one. You finally fly across the Atlantic to meet her when upon your arrival, you find out that the love of your life is really a level 9 psychotic bitch. Here's what this poor sap had to deal with:

"I found a note on the kitchen table saying that she wanted me out of her house and if I didn't get out by midday she was going to call the cops. This is even though I had been cleaning her dust infested apartment and looking after her daughter. Next to this note she had also left another note which horrified me. She claimed she was HIV positive and that she'd been putting her blood in my milk and food."

Read the Full Story.

10. You Got the Right Stuff, Baby...

Jami from Date Wrecks has tons of ridiculous online dating stories but this one really takes the cake. Again, this guy starts out to be a completely normal nice guy in the beginning but by the end of the story you can't help but feel bad for how pathetic the guy is. Here is one text message she got from him after their third date:

“I want to turn into a metal monster and pierce you with a drill penis killing you and having to assimilate with me so we can be one.”

Wow, just wow!

As you might imagine, this sends up a major red flag. The worse part is that trying to get rid of the schmuck just makes things worse, to the point where he sings New Kids on the Block into her voice mail. The actual sound recording is in her post.

My summary isn't doing this any justice, just go read the full shit show right now.

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Thank god there are plenty of fish in the sea...

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If anyone can beat these 10 stories then please post your messed up online date in the comments or shoot me a link to the article.

My Cougar Dating Story

2009-10-27T22:31:00.004-04:00

One year ago...

She's sitting down the bar twirling a tiny straw around in high ball glass of what I presume is a gin and tonic. She's got a tight body and is all prettied up with make-up, hair and a sexy outfit, a bit overkill if you ask me, well at least for being in a small dive bar on a Tuesday night. She's definitely older than me, probably in her early forties, about ten to twelve more years than myself. She keeps making eyes at me; those extra long stares, some people might call it the "fuck me eyes," but whatever it is I know there is definitely some attraction.

I flash her a few smiles and acknowledge her flirtation. At this, she rises from her bar stool and walks directly over and sits next to me. Her legs crossed in a way that exposes her upper thigh and her cleavage stretching tight against a thin black blouse. She immediately opens up to conversation, introducing herself and exclaiming how she never approaches guys at bars like this...yeaaa right! It's at this moment that it dawns on me. She is on the prowl. Oh my god, it's a cougar!!

I had often heard many great cougar dating stories from some of my more sexually active college friends, stories that seemed beyond the realm of possibility to me, but tonight it looked like the cougar was finally attacking my scrawny nerdy boyishly handsome self... alright maybe I'm embellishing a bit but hey, I look young!

By the way, for those that don't know, a "cougar" is a slang term for an older woman who pursues and dates much younger men, with the age disparity usually having a gap of at least ten years or more.

The cougar dating scene has really only become in vogue recently, within the past decade, as previously this type of behavior was taboo or socially unacceptable for older women at the time. However, now cougar dating is almost catching on as a fad. It seems to evolved to the point where it's a sign of power and individuality for those older women. Some of them are divorcees simply looking to have fun, not ready to settle down again. Some are high powered executives who are more dominant and looking for a boy toy. I can't really say where the term cougar came from but it seems to fit well as a metaphor for this type of womanly behavior.

Ok, lets get back to my story...

Finally, after she buys me multiple rounds of drinks and we have a lengthy yet flirtatious conversation, we end up back at my place...yadda yadda yadda... I now have my own cougar. Well actually she has me.

The next couple months go great. Basically she calls me on random nights when she's feeling energetic, it's always on her terms, but the best part is she always buys when we go out, or brings me beer or wine when she comes over. It's almost like have a sugarmama I suppose.

Whatever type of relationship we have, it's certainly not a serious one and it can't last. And as with most cougar dating stories this one ends up with an unemotional and mutual ending. I can't say that it was one of the most meaningful relationship I've had, it wasn't at all, but holy shit, the sex was fantastic!

Present day...

So that little gem of a story occurred well over a year ago now. I'm not really looking for anything like that now. I really want more of a committed relationship a little closer to my age range, which is why I am still scouring the online dating scene. The experience was certainly nice though for a little fling and I learned a lot in the bedroom as well, which really helped me out. So in that respect, for you single younger guys out there looking for a little more experience I actually recommend finding yourself, or at least being prey, to lovely older woman.

There are even niche online dating sites popping up these days devoted particularly to cougar dating to help make the process more efficient. Hell you could probably even find plenty of them on free dating sites like Plenty of Fish if you look hard enough.

Vegetarian Dating Options?

2009-10-26T23:49:00.004-04:00

It just occurred to me that Plenty of Fish doesn't has an option to categorize oneself as a vegan or vegetarian. There are plenty of other things to categorize oneself by like religion, body type, preference for children, your drinking/smoking habits and even if you have a car or not. All of these very clear lifestyle choices that one would certainly consider when looking for a potential relationship. Yet the one thing that isn't categorized is a person's eating habits.

Now maybe it's just me and I live in a large liberal city, Boston, with tons of mostly liberal college students with a pretty good chunk of them, from my observation, being vegetarians or vegans. I'm not sure why I'm relating liberalism with the propensity towards vegetarianism but it seems to be the case. Anyways, from this growing trend I think that it is apparent that more and more people will want to date and be in relationships with people of similar eating habits.

It makes sense to filter dates in this manner, particularly when on large dating sites like PlentyofFish.

For example, the last girl I dated was a vegetarian. Though I tend to lean towards a mostly vegetarian diet, I'm still an omnivore and consume meat on an occasional basis. This got pretty tricky when we'd go out to eat on dates. Sometimes I would forget that she was a vegetarian and take her to places with little options for that kind of diet... oopps! Luckily for me, she was pretty easy going with having to deal with restaurants filled with voracious carnivores, but I have heard some stories where the omnivore/vegan dates really butt heads.

There was a good New York Times article last year called, "I Love You, but You Love Meat," which nicely illustrated the potential dating conflicts that meat eaters and vegans can have.

"...many vegetarians say they cannot date anyone who eats meat. Vegans, who avoid eating not just animals but animal-derived products, take it further, shivering at the thought of kissing someone who has even sipped honey-sweetened tea."

Sometimes it probably goes a little too far but I certainly don't blame people for only wanting to date others with the same eating habits. After all, eating is a pretty big part of our lives, it ranks way up there on the needs scale, right next to stuff like... breathing. When you're eating three times a day, at least one of those meals is probably with your spouse, doesn't it make sense that the two should be on the same page diet wise?

As far as online dating sites go, there's one for every niche out there. Of course, this certainly means that there are vegetarian and vegan dating sites to cater to this crowd. Take the site VeggieDate for example which caters to people with all kinds of variations in veggie like diets from lacto ovo vegetarians, vegans and even macrobiotic diets... whatever that is.

So here's my thing, with the rise of preferences for a certain dietary lifestyle in a relationship, shouldn't this be a category choice added to the mainstream online dating sites like Plenty of Fish? Isn't one's choice in food just as important a quality in a date as their drinking habits? Perhaps I'm nitpicking a bit but I think I just might be on to something here.

A quick search in the PlentyofFish forums with the word "vegetarian" brings up a crap load of threads, over thirty, all with the same heated debates about dating vegetarians, vegans and the like.

What do you guys and gals think? How does ones dietary choice affect your online dating habits?

Examples of Good Male Dating Profiles

2009-07-01T23:12:00.015-04:00

Over the past week, I have been scouring through tons of Male Plenty of Fish online profiles. Not that I'm checking out guys or anything (I love the ladies) but I was trying to look for some examples of great male dating profiles. To do this, I browsed through as many guys as I could and anyone that had 10 or more favorites, I jotted down in my spreadsheet for later analysis.

First off, I would just like to say that finding male profiles with more than 10 favorites was quite a difficult task. There are not many at all. Just a rough calculation, I'd say that for about every thirty male online profiles I visited, only one would have 10 or more favorites.

Now on to my findings, which will basically be a quantitative and qualitative analysis of about twenty different mens' Plenty of Fish online dating profiles that indicated a high female attraction rate.

Age Level

The first thing that stuck out to me was that the age range of all the men were almost all between the ages of 30-35 with a couple in their late twenties and a couple over 35. This makes some sense to me as it would seem that the 28-35 is still young enough for women down to their early twenties to date, yet at the same time much more mature than your typical college frat guy. In this age range they are likely to be down a solid career path and have experience in the dating scene.

Height Level - Tall Guys and Short Guys

One thing that I was expecting was the heights of the 20 men to be tall but this was not true. Though there were certainly a number of guys that were all around 6 feet, there was a decent group of shorter guys from 5'4 to 5'8. So, even though taller guys have an advantage in online dating, it is not unheard of for a shorter guy to attract women on PlentyofFish.

Profile Pictures

I know what your going to say, these guys were all naturally handsome. I thought of that and yes some looked like they were borderline male models, but not all of them. I'd say half of these guys were average looking at best. Some even had their picture ratings averaging around 4 on a 1 to 10 scale! However, the one thing that they all did have, were decent pictures of themselves. None of the typical cellphone in the mirror with your shirt-off picture, nor the grainy, "I'm half in the bag at my favorite bar picture." They weren't professional looking but they were good pics, usually with a simple profile shot looking relaxed with a nice smile.

Body Type

For the body type category, a large majority were "Athletic" with the rest being listed as "Average." One guy listed "Thin" but his pictures actually looked pretty athletic to me.

This brings me to a personal issue that I just realized. I am a competitive long distance runner and though I am quite thin, I am pretty lean. This whole time I've been listing myself as thin, when really I could probably get away with listing athletic if I wanted to, after all my abs are coming along quite nicely:)

So the lesson learned here is get off your asses guys and get to the gym. If not for your Plenty of Fish profiles then at least for yourselves!

Relationship Type or 'Looking For

For the relationship type, "Long Term" and "Dating" were the two most common listed in the "Looking For" section with one guy listing "Friends." This was interest that long term relationships were valued almost equally as the guys just listing the dating option. I suppose this would prove that women are looking for guys that can be in a committed relationship. Also, it's important to note that the other categories like: intimate encounters, activity partner, hang out, talk/email, and other relationship were none existent in this group of guys.

Example Male Dating Profiles

Now on to the written part of the PlentyofFish profiles, the 'About Me' section. These are a little harder to quantify and there wasn't anything specific that stood out, with the exception that all 20 profiles had excellent spelling and grammar. None of them were overly long, usually only two to three maximum of paragraphs, while a couple were shorter with only about one paragraph. Positivity and good outlook on life were typical and most men seemed to have "confident" profiles as in, they knew what they wanted out of life and out of a relationship.

In the interest of privacy, I'm not going to link to all the profiles, but I will give you some excerpts from some of the About Me sections that I thought were good. Also, PLEASE, do not copy these, they're just examples, you need to write your own unique online dating profile that is congruent to your personality.

Sample Male Profile #1

ABOUT ME: As a person I like to think of myself as confident but not a ****. I'm a very humble man. I understand that there's a time to give and be loving and understanding. I also believe in standing up for what I believe and not being walked on. I'm always there for my friends and loved ones. I don't run from adversity. I care what people think of me because I believe in being the best man I can be. I want people who come across me to think "hey what a cool guy". It's not about attention for me. It's about the importance of ones own honor and respect for those around him.

GOALS: Looking to find a way into the music business. At what capacity, I'm not sure yet but I'm exploring many ideas. I really want to find a woman to love and share in the beauty that is life. I also want to continue to help those around me I care for to achieve their goals.

WHAT MAKES ME DIFFERENT: I was raised by a single mother. Watched her get hurt many times. Made me believe how important it is to treat a woman right. My mother also taught me how to have inner strength and not to get walked on. I'm covered in tattoo's and it's made me understand just how fickle society is. I'm a TRUE heavy metal fan. I've had to overcome some shitty things in life and in doing so it's made me a much stronger man.

Music: As I've already stated I'm a huge Heavy Metal fan. I'm a guitar tech (in training) for the signed band --------. I'm very passionate about the tattooed and heavy metal communities. We get a bad rap sometimes and it's a shame cause there's some really beautiful people within these realms of society.

What I like about this guy was that he really showed a lot of passion for life and compassion for women. And mentioning his mom in there was pure gold, who wouldn't want to be around a guy like this?

Sample Profile #2

A little about myself…

I am a very hard working dedicated person and I live life to it's fullest. I laugh often and am very optimistic. I think my smile is contagious :) I have young children, ages 8 and 11, that I simply love. My 11 year old is soooo smart that we are able to have intellectual conversations (or does that mean I have the intellect of an 11 year old?). My 8 year old is fun too but is the complete opposite of the other.

I am a lifetime student and I have 2 undergrad degrees, one graduate, and I'm working on my MBA now. I tell myself I will stop after this one. I guess I just like the challenge :)

In my free time I spend lots of time with my children (they don't live with me, but they live very close by), play the piano and drums, exercise daily, mountain bike, ride jet skis and 4 wheelers in the summer and snowboard in the winter. I always try to keep busy doing something. Oh and I LOVE to cook.

I enjoy helping others more than anything else. I would put everything I'm doing on hold if someone I know needed help with anything at all.

I love to travel (the Caribbean being my favorite) and while my immediate family all live here, I have family on the east coast, west coast, and in Southern France. I visit them all as often as possible.

I am incredibly honest and trustworthy. I would expect my match to have the same qualities. That is extremely important.

I have a great, maybe sarcastic, sense of humor (some would say disturbing). My humor is along the lines of Simpsons, Reno 911, Chevy Chase, Naked Gun, Seinfeld, stuff like that.

By the way, this guy is 5'6 and had about 40 favorites on his PlentyofFish profile. What I like about this one is that you can tell he's a super great Dad, which is important for a lot of women and he shows how active and fun his life is.

Sample Male Profile #3

Who am I? . . . I'm Spider-Man. Wait, no, that was a movie! . . . . . I would describe myself as stable in my career and goal-oriented. I enjoy making people laugh. I am intelligent and can carry on meaningful conversations. I care about other people's feelings. . . . . . When I'm with someone special I like being spontaneous, adventurous, romantic, surprising them with little gestures, sensual, playful, and basically having that type of fun you see two people who just met in the movies having! Someone to laugh with, hang out with, be spontaneous with, and have fun with! I'm looking for someone who has similar qualities and desires someone who they can connect with . . . . . . I feel there has to be mutual physical attraction for there to be good chemistry between two people. So being fit and having good looks are important, as well as sensuality and affection. . . . . . Having some similar interests helps--some things I enjoy are fine dining, walking at the beach at night, going dancing, watching movies including foreign films, travelling, going snowboarding, going on day trips to local attractions, having romantic nights at home, cuddling, and basically having a blast together. . . . . .

This one was my favorite out of all of them. He really hit everything on the head, covering a great deal about him and what he was looking for in a short amount of space.

Final Statements

So there you have it folks. It's a lot of information to cover, especially since the sample size of this was 20 male profiles, but please keep in mind that these guys were the cream of the crop... or shall we say the sharks of the sea. Also, I know I left out a bunch of categories like religion, race, have a car, etc, etc, but that would take up way to much time right now and I think I already covered the basics.

In the future, I'll likely expand on this study to include both a larger sample size and include more category data. Collecting this type of information on Plenty of Fish takes a long time, so if anyone out there is interested in collaborating on a larger scale study similar to this, please let me know.

As far as helping figure out what the perfect online dating profile is, I suppose we can say that it helps if you are a 30-35 year old male, good profile pictures, athletic, looking for a long term relationship and have a well written profile, then you are golden. For everyone else, don't despair, take what you know and adapt as best you can to compete, after all, there are plenty of fish in the sea.

Social Proof in Online Dating Profiles

2009-05-19T15:56:00.022-04:00

What if there was a way to influence potential online daters to perceive you and your Plenty of Fish profile as more attractive? There is a way, it may not be up some people's alley, but we're going to take a look anyways.

There is a concept in psychology called Social Proof. Social proof is essentially a phenomenon that occurs when the consensus of others has an influence on the thoughts of a person. Hence, it is society giving us proof of a decision. This concept was made famous by Robert Cialdini's book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

A good example of social proof is the idea of "canned" laughter that we often hear on sitcoms. Though we probably tend to think it is annoying, at least I do, there has been research conducted by television producers that say canned laughter in a show will have a higher perceived "funniness" than the same show without the canned laughter. This is social proof at work, as the laughter is the proof that is influencing a person's decision on whether the show is funny or not.

So what does this have to do with online dating? Actually the better question is, how can social proof help me in my online dating?

Luckily there are a number of dating gurus who have been testing this concept on a number of social media and online dating websites. Let's take a look at some of these concepts and see how they can be applied to your Plenty of Fish dating profile.

Using Prop Profile Pictures

A prop picture is a picture with you either doing something really interesting or in an interesting place. The point to using prop pictures in your online dating profile is to help convey higher value or status.

For example, if you've ever been on vacation or traveled to an interesting place, lets say Paris, then putting up a picture of you standing in front of the Eiffel tower is going to help convey desirable qualities about you. It shows that you like to travel, that you are adventurous and that you like to have fun. And displaying these values goes a lot farther using pictures than it ever would by simply writing it in your 'About Me' section.

Getting Testimonials on Your Profile

We've all seen sales pages or commercials with testimonials from various people about how great a product is. This is a common marketing tactic which uses social proof and there is a reason that testimonies are commonly used for these purposes - because they work! Well, what if we applied the same principle to our profiles?

On the bottom of every PlentyofFish dating profile there is a section in which other people can write a testimony about you and it can be from anyone who has an account on PlentyofFish.com. Now this might be a problem for some people because they don't know anyone who would write a testimony for them.

One way to get these is to simply ask a good friend of yours of the opposite sex. For example, I recently asked a girl I've known for about ten years now and is one of my best friends if she could quickly sign-up for Plenty of Fish and write me a glowing testimonial of how super fun and awesome I am:) Well, because she is such a great friend, she pulled through and wrote a great testimony which now acts as social proof for me.

Favorites

Another form of social proof which I've talked about in the past is the number of Favorites that is listed at the bottom of your profile. Favorites are essentially like a bookmark for people who find your profile attractive or interesting. It's almost like a positive vote for your profile and the higher the number your Favorites is, then the more it is likely to act as social proof. For instance, when someone scrolls down the page and sees that you have a huge number of favorites than they will be more likely to take a closer look at the profile.

Of course, there isn't really any good way of manipulating this number to make it higher, so you'll just have to work hard on creating a great dating profile and let that number increase naturally.

Plenty of Fish Serious Member Effectiveness

2009-04-10T09:47:00.019-04:00

It's been about 1 month now since Plenty of Fish launched it's serious member upgrade option. This new feature basically included nothing more than having your profile search results appear in a different color along with having a star badge next to your profile.

Being the curious kind of guy that I am, I decided to do a little digging today and try to get some statistics on how effective this new Serious Member Upgrade was for those participating.

To start I searched through 600 male profiles and 600 females profiles for everyone with a serious membership.

These were the results. Out of 600 male profiles ONLY 3 had upgraded to a premium membership. Out of the 600 female profiles, 53 had upgraded. It seems like quite a big difference but keep in mind that it is only 1% and 9% respectively of the total sample size. Also, it must be noted that there were quite a few females on the message boards awhile back that indicated they were getting their profiles upgraded automatically (free of charge). So this could also account for a wider margin between the male and female paid option.

Now that we have an idea of the number of people participating in the Plenty of Fish premium accounts, is it possible to determine how effective these "Serious" members are in attracting more online dates?

This is hard to say because the point, in my opinion, of the paid membership is simply to draw more visitors to your profile. There is nothing that a shade of yellow and a star next to your picture is going to make you any more or less attractive. However, one could say that if "Serious" members are indeed having a higher click-through rate to their profiles, those members with good profiles should have a higher amount of "Favorites."

As some readers may know, I use the "Favorites" metric on each member's profile as an indicator of interest or a sign of attraction.

Before we get into the Favorites analysis of serious vs. regular members, I'd like to first take a closer look at the three lonely guys who actually ponied up cash to have their profiles highlighted in yellow.

Upgraded Plenty of Fish Male Profiles

Guy#1 had 1 favorite

Though this guy's little yellow star badge says he's a serious member, his profile says the opposite. He had one picture which was blurry and poorly done, as if taken from a cellphone. His "about me" section was three sentences long, with horrendous spelling and grammar issues. This guy is anything but serious and is obviously wasting his $5.99 per month on this sorry excuse for a profile.

Guy#2 had 8 favorites

This guy had what I'd call an average profile. A couple of decent pictures and a typical "about me" section that explains how he's a nice guy looking for the right girl, etc, etc.

Guy#3 had 26 favorites

This guy had the full 8 pictures, all pretty decent, except three of which were solely of his pick-up truck taken from different angles. Now, I don't really get the whole picture of your truck thing, but I'm just city boy, so what do I know. In addition to the pictures, the guy's written profile was pretty slim, only about two sentences of "about me," which is why I find it amazing that he has 26 favorites (that's really high for a guy). Perhaps the Serious Member badge is helping him out, or perhaps there is more to this pickup truck thing than I thought.

Upgraded PlentyofFish Female Profiles

Since there were 53 upgraded female profiles in my sample I'm not going to go through each one. However, from my general observations there wasn't much of a pattern, the profiles were similar to the men where some were really bad, some were average and some were really good.

The first thing I think we can conclude from the profile observations is that being a "Serious" member does not necessarily mean that you are serious about creating a great Plenty of Fish online dating profile.

Favorites Analysis

Now lets get our hands dirty and take a look at how the Serious Members' favorites compare with the Regular Members. I basically recorded the number of favorites for each serious profile for each gender. Then I took the average and the median of each gender. Also, for comparison purposes, I took an old set of data from my Profile Picture experiment, and found the same thing.

I want to note here that I am using old data because I am comparing the average and median to typical member profiles before "paid" membership was implemented to the "serious" profiles of now. I feel that this is a better way of seeing how effective a paid membership is.

Conclusions

As you can see in the above graphs, the men seem to do better with the paid memberships where the women don't have much of a difference at all. The big glaring problem though, is that there were only three paid male memberships in the sample, so it's difficult to say how good those represent all men who are premium members (it's difficult to find paying members who are males).

So as of now, I'd say that paid memberships on Plenty of Fish really aren't worth it. Not until we can get some better metrics on something like the Click-through rates of Serious vs. Regular profiles. Perhaps this is something that Markus could provide in the future.

Online Dating Profile Word Clouds

2009-03-12T22:49:00.011-04:00

I noticed an interesting experiment on another blog the other day which utilized word clouds to examine online dating profiles. For those that don't know, a word cloud is a graphical representation of the frequency amount of each word used in a given text. For example, a word that is used 10 times in a body of text will appear much larger than a word that is only used once or twice. Many of you will have probably seen similar displays as a "tag cloud" on various other blogs and websites.

Using this concept, I decided to conduct my own little experiment using the profiles on the Plenty of Fish dating site, specifically the "Interests" section of the profile.

I went on to PlentyofFish .com and copy and pasted the Interests sections of 50 female profiles and converted them into word clouds using the Wordle web-site. I repeated the same process again using 50 male profiles and converted those into their own word cloud.

Female Online Dating Profile Word Cloud

Male Online Dating Profile Word Cloud

As you can see there are both similarities as well as some big differences. Lets see if we can analyze this a bit, shall we?

First, lets take a look at the biggest/most used words in the female profiles, which are:

music, movies, friends, dancing, beach, reading, family, concerts, traveling, shopping, laughing, fun and tattoos

Now lets take a look at the biggest/most used words in the male profiles, which are:

sports, music, movies, fishing, camping, cooking, outdoors, golf, football, beach and travel

Obviously, everyone likes music and movies, so it's no big surprise that those are two of the biggest interests for both profiles. Also, no big surprise that 'sports' is the biggest word in the men's' online dating profile.

What I find interesting though is that the female dating profiles tend to be more about emotions and bonding, with words like: friends, family, laughing and fun. While the men's' interests are mostly activity based and typically some sort of outdoors activity or sport.

A few more interesting observations:

The word 'cooking' is used more as a male interest than a female interest
Tattoos and piercings is a fairly common interest for the ladies. Does this mean that they enjoy getting tattoos or do they like guys with tattoos?
The word 'bars' is used more on female profiles than on males
Though cooking is a big interest in males, the females tend to list specific types of food like: sushi, Mexican, chocolate, and cookies

It really is interesting and I've been studying these for over an hour now.

So, how does this help you with your own Plenty of Fish profile? I'm not exactly sure, but I could say that you get a pretty good idea of some of the generic interests that most people list. And if you are trying to generate a profile that is unique and really sticks out, then it might be a good idea to avoid the generic 'movies', 'music', etc.

A good strategy might be to list specific types of music or specific genres of movies. Even listing a bunch quirky fun things that barely anyone else would add to their online profile would help to spark curiosity and attention.

I saw a good example of someone mixing up their interests section so that it was interesting, funny, and unique:

It has some general interests as well as some that you wouldn't normally expect. It definitely helps to make the online dating profile more fun.

Criticisim of Plenty of Fish Premium Dating

2009-03-08T22:05:00.011-04:00

A reader has emailed me with a critical look at Plenty of Fish's new premium "Serious Member" upgrade, among other general faults on the workings of the online dating system. The email raises some good points and deserves a post of it's own, so here it is:

---

Mr. Savage:

I've reviewed nearly all the content on your PlentyofFish weblog with interest, being myself a veteran of that date site pond and many others. I disagree with some of your advice, particularly when it fails to account for the multiple kinds of goals and postures people bring to these sites. I also don't think your statistical musings rise much above speculation. But you do raise valid concerns and are spot-on regarding the "garbage-in-garbage-out" cycle which results from what I see as widespread misuse of this resource Mr. Markus Frind has nurtured.

This new enhanced profile status idea disturbs me, and it would even if charging a fee was not an issue. I'm not crazy about creating a perceived caste system on a site which has been so much better than others at providing a fair platform of self expression. I'm opposed to the notion that money equals seriousness of intent. That idea works if you're an independent contractor facing a tire-kicking client. It does not make sense for a member of a social community in which everyone is offering something very personal and slightly different. This can only excite those who judge the thickness of a wallet or purse before deigning to make a friend, which will make for ugly encounters indeed.

What I've seen time and again on both subscription and sponsor model sites is that the members themselves dictate their own "serious" behavior, and most clearly are not willing or able to put in the effort dreams often require. Among PlentyofFish's many attractions is how it sidesteps the fraud built in to the paid sites, and utterly eliminates the "closing bell panic" which may set in as yet another billing cycle ends without yielding anything to warm one's bed. I have scowled and barked for years that a majority of users have the dating site concept confused with a vending machine. Stripping the monthly fee grants the gift of time for relationships to develop on their own, just as they might in real airspace between people if online dating did not exist.

My other objection to this dubious new feature is more alarming and functional. Here is today's result of following the site's "call to action" link, a browser warning:

"- The certificate for "VeriSign Trust Network" expired Jan 7 23:59:59 2004 GMT. The webmaster should update the certificate(s). "

FIVE YEARS out of date? I'll pay to "seriously" subscribe when _they_ are serious about online security.

All said, I am not opposed to Frind charging for some premium benefit. No one outside the Billionaire's Clubhouse is immune to our current thorny financial problems, and I'm not certain how long click-through revenue was going to be sustainable in an era of phishing scams and spam gangs hogging four of every five emails. But gold stars and background colors? How infantile. This is worse by far than those gawd-awfully tasteless "virtual gift" JPEGs you "purchase" with the equivalent of arcade prize tickets. Some forum posters have suggested more constructive benefits, such as profile counseling, or identity verification.

I'm not sure yet what I would want for a monthly fee, but pictures of huggy-bears and rigged search results do not address the site's essential lack of personality, which is traced directly back to the lack of personality contained in many profiles. There may be women finding their bliss on a coin-toss percentage, but I can attest to many others who soon give up trying when they have their fill of the running theme of despair and empty gestures found throughout the membership. Perhaps the site is like an amusement park with a half mile midway and one ride. It just needs more junk to do and get people mingling, like on the nearest rival OK Cupid.

---

Good stuff. Thanks to the reader who sent this in and thanks for providing your 8 cents :)

PlentyofFish Gets Serious with Paid Memberships

2009-03-05T18:55:00.006-05:00

Owner and founder of Plentyoffish.com, Markus Frind, announced today on his blog that the online dating site will be offering a new paid premium feature. Of course, the main site will remain absolutely free with all it's current features, the only difference between the free membership and the paid premium membership is that it will have a "serious" button. Yes, that's right, you pay to have your profile stick out in the vast ocean of members and signal that you are SERIOUS about dating.

Take a look at the screen shot below to see what the changes will look like:

It is still unknown how much the paid "serious" upgrade will be, however, Markus has indicated that the length will likely be for periods of 3, 6, or 12 months at a time. Though, given Markus' competitive nature in the online dating industry, I wouldn't be surprised if this premium membership feature is quite cheap and significantly undercuts paid memberships for other online dating sites.

This is no big surprise considering that in the last several months, Markus has indicated on his blog that he was either looking to buy a paid membership dating site and/or integrate premium features into PlentyofFish. It will certainly be interesting to see how many current members take up the new paid option.

So what does this mean for the dating scene at Plentyoffish and how will it change?

My first thoughts is that this will certainly help people to identify which profiles are definitely legit. One of the big problems that the site has had in the past is a lot of fake spam profiles. Essentially, profiles of beautiful women set-up for the sole purpose of soliciting either your email address or trying to get you to sign-up for another adult dating site. This is a typical problem of free online dating sites and Plenty of Fish has been no exception, despite their efforts to prevent this type of phishing. Hopefully, the Serious badge will help people who are... ummm, serious.

My second thought is that this could be a great tool for those men who are having problems getting their profile noticed. As we know, the quantity of men on Plentyoffish far outnumber the women and it tends to be difficult, even for attractive men, to get noticed and attract potential dates. This "serious" badge will hopefully help those men willing to pay to stick out but will also indicate that they aren't cheap either, which could be a decent attraction quality.

On the flip side, I'm also wondering that in a large dating site filled with free memberships, that a paid member could possibly be seen as desperate. I'm not sure, what do you guys think?

Perhaps after a month or two of the premium membership being instigated, I'll conduct some research similar to the picture experiment except trying to quantify the attraction levels of "Serious" POF members.

Update

I just found a thread on the forums in which this topic is being highly debated and also reveals the pricing structure of the new premium feature.

The payment options will be as follows...

1 year @ $5.99/month ($71.88)
6 months @ $7.99/month ($47.94)
3 months @ $9.99/month ($29.97)

If you ask me, this is a little steep considering the only thing that gets added to your profile is a "badge" and it'll stick out more in the dating searches. Is that really worth $6-$10 dollars a month?

According to the poll he's running in the first post of the thread, most people would not. However, it does show that a small percentage, perhaps 5-10% would be willing to pay. Now that may not seem like much, but consider the size of PlentyofFish's membership base of approximately 2.8 million members according to a recent article in Inc. If just 5% of current members paid $6 per month, Markus would be raking in an extra $800 grand per month for an additional $10 million per year, on top of his reportedly $10 million in yearly Adsense revenue.

It's definitely a smart business move in my opinion, but the real question is, will actually help the members of the site? Only time will tell.

Intimate Encounters on Plenty of Fish

2009-02-28T15:49:00.019-05:00

Like most online dating sites, plentyoffish.com, offers an option for what's referred to as "Intimate Encounters." This particular option, as with most free dating sites (CraigsList for example), is basically a booty call for a one night stand. Not that I'm particularly into this type of thing, but I have noticed that there are a number of discussions regarding the intimate encounters aspect of Plenty of Fish lately. Also, I want to make it clear before I go any further that this site isn't about getting one night stands from online dating sites, however, it's still an interesting topic in my opinion, so lets talk about it.

The first big thing that caught my eye was an article in the News of the World. The article describes a woman who is really into online dating, but not just any regular old dating. She has gone out and slept with over 200 of her online dates! Here are a few choice quotes from the article:

"On average, she beds a different man every FIVE DAYS. She’s even had sex with THREE of them in ONE DAY...

...She admits: “I can’t explain the buzz I get from meeting someone for the first time and knowing that in a couple of hours we’ll be ripping each other’s clothes off. It’s addictive."

and here's her picture:

Now here's the thing, she uses two sites for bedding men, benaughty.com and plentyoffish. Yes, there are actually women on Plenty of Fish who are simply out for a one night hook-up. This may seem unfathomable to most men who have used PlentyofFish, as most of them can barely get a response to their email messages let alone a one night stand with an attractive woman, but there is at least one woman on the site who is ready and willing.

Of course this is just one woman. She must be an outlier, correct? Well, I'm not so sure. I'm reminded of a post I wrote a few months ago about the promiscuity of women online. It talks about a recent trend of Intimate Encounters which the founder of Plenty of Fish, Markus Frind, noticed. The trend basically showed that since 2004, the number of women on the site who selected the "intimate encounter" option went from 9% of women up to 18%. Now 18% is nothing to sneeze at. To put it into perspective, at this moment there are 112,382 online, which means approximately 20 thousand of those are looking for an intimate encounter. Just a simple search within ten miles of my zip code shows 74 women online who have chose the intimate encounter option.

Now, I know what you are thinking. All the women looking for intimate encounters are likely to be ugly or have some other abnormality. The argument being that why would an attractive girl need to use an online dating site if she is just looking to "hook-up" for the night. She could simply go out to the nearest bar and wait for the men to flock to her. Again, I don't think that is the case. A quick glance at my IE search results shows a number of attractive women in the pictures.

Also, there was an excellent post by one woman on the message boards, which gave a good reason as to why women would use plentyoffish for finding intimate encounters:

"Okay first of all you don't have to be ugly to want to have to have an intimate encounter -

Maybe getting thrown up on or possibly killed by some random dude at the bar isn't appealing.
Maybe you are too busy to date but have a kicking sex drive
Maybe you are a person who owns their sexuality and doesn't let anyone else define what is right for you- you decide for yourself and you take it!
Maybe looking online gives you a chance to take as much time as you want to to get to know that person.
Maybe you are looking for a regular, a boy toy, a maintenance man.
Maybe if you have these close minded ideas about the modern women, you are too ugly for them to sleep with you!

So guess what - I've done at least one of these things and I am not ashamed to admit it. I have needs, wants and desires and I don't care if someone else doesn't agree. I am not saying its a permanent solution, I am just saying its time to cut the crap and stop making women out to be these holy beings that can't get their swerve on like guys do. You guys can't have it both ways and women need to stop bowing to such pretentious ideas, its much more liberating when you take your sexuality into your own hands and that doesn't make you a slut. Don't knock it until you try it, I embrace my sexuality as long as I do it responsibly and I highly recommend opening that "Pandora's box" to any women who hasn't."

This is just one example, but if you search through the forums even more, you will find other women who freely admit that they are just out for a hook-up.

Looking at all the evidence shown above, it does appear that the "intimate encounter" market on Plenty of Fish is active and could possibly provide results for those that are inclined to this type of online dating. Actually getting the date or rather, the encounter, is a whole other subject on it's own.

Has anyone out there ever gotten good results from the intimate encounter option? Let me know in the comments.

The Unsatisfied Women of Plenty of Fish

2009-02-19T21:00:00.007-05:00

I've been searching around various different blogs lately trying to find different people's experiences in using PlentyofFish. Lately, I've been stumbling across some blog posts by some women who are out in the dating scene looking for potential male suitors. Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of disappointment in the men on the site. And for the most part, these men are making a lot of the common mistakes that I've mentioned repeatedly on this very blog. Lets take a further look at two of these examples, shall we?

The Saving Diva

Saving Diva setup a Plenty of Fish profile and has commented that she receives many short lame messages containing such subject lines as Hi, cute pic, etc. as I've discussed in my post about sucky subject lines.

"One guy actually referred to me as "sweetpea." I haven't been responding to the majority of the messages, and I haven't received a decent message yet. Is this how all online dating sites are? If so, count me out! I need a little effort put into a message."

So far though, she has actually gone out on a number of dates with some guys she met on Plenty of Fish. However, it was apparent that not all went well; below are a few of the men's dating faux pas:

A couple of guys ended up lying about their height and were shorter than described in their profiles
One of these had questionable manners
One guy lied about his age
Another didn't look like his pictures
and a couple of them were quite boring

So, as we can see, the selection of decent guys on the site are few and far between, though her POF date#3 seemed to be a winner despite owning a Porshe Boxster S (apparently that's a turn-off?)

Romi from The Year of the Chick

Romi had an excursion on Plenty of Fish back in October which resulted in some humorous blog posts, but she basically concluded at the end that all she found were duds. Along with Dating Diva, she also received a lot of crappy email messages:

"I find that every time I enter the site and cruise around, there are five emails waiting after only a couple of minutes. What this means of course is sifting through a lot of crap, such as: ”Hey baby”—crap, “Can I see more pictures?”—crap, “I want to make you my everything”—crap, etc, etc, etc."

I don't think she ever went on a date with anyone, but it's clear in her making fun of the ridiculous messages she got why she wouldn't or couldn't find a decent date on the site.

----

So, it seems that these two women, who seem like great catches, just aren't getting the kind of quality game fish that you'd find on paid dating sites or in real life for that matter. This just goes to prove my theory that the competition between men on PlentyofFish.com is quite weak despite the incredible large quantity.

This is both good for those of us able to display interesting attractive personalities through the site but also bad because it makes it more difficult to stick out amongst the rest of the mackerels.

Also, it appears that both Saving Diva and Romi experienced the same thing I had when I set up the fake profile and received tons and tons of garbage messages with ridiculous short sited subject lines like; hi, hey, hello, etc.

Another problem that is pretty apparent to me is the lying. Now, that is something I just don't understand. When you setup a Plenty of Fish profile you have to realize that the intent is to eventually meet other people in real life. And when your first impression to that person is of being a liar then you are off to a really bad start. Chances are that there isn't going to be a second date and you basically wasted your time.

All in all, I am beginning to understand the frustrations of women on plentyoffish. It's like the guys aren't even trying. Seriously, these guys really need to start reading my blog...

Plenty of Fish Picture Experiment

2009-02-11T17:25:00.010-05:00

Introduction

Recently I decided to test out a theory by my friends Race and Kelly on the Plenty of Fish dating site. The concept is simple. Basically it states that the more quality pictures you have visible on your online profile, the more value you display and thus the more dates you will be able to receive. For example, if you applied this concept to plentyoffish.com then it would mean that a person who displays the maximum 8 pictures in their profile is more likely to create attraction than a person who displays only one picture.

Luckily, POF comes with an easy way to measure a profile's attraction. If we can measure the attraction of a profile and we know how many pictures those same profiles display, it shouldn't be too difficult to come up with some type of measure between the quantity of pictures displayed and the level of attraction.

How do we measure attraction on a Plenty of Fish profile? Simply by looking at the number times a profile has been "favorited." When someone favorites you, that is an indicator of interest or attraction. So, we can assume that profiles with a high number of favorites should be considered highly attractive individuals and profiles with a low number of favorites would be considered less attractive.

Procedure

The first step in this experiment was to gather all the data. I went through the PlentyofFish site and selected random men and women from across the country and recorded both the quantity of pictures and number of times favorited for each profile. In all, I collected data from approximately 200 sets of male profiles and 200 sets of female profiles.

I then sorted each data set (one for each gender) by the quantity of pictures displayed and took an average of the "Favorites" for each quantity group.

I then graphed the correlation between the quantity of profile pictures and the # times favorited.

Data

Click to view all data in spreadsheet format

Results

Looking at the male graph, it is pretty clear that there is a positive correlation between quantity of profile pictures and attraction. It shows that for each picture, attraction level or "favorites" will on average increase by the same amount.

The female graph, however, is a bit more crazy. There is certainly an upward trend in # times favorited but has a few erratic swings with a big dip at 5 pictures, a giant spike at 6 pictures and then dropping again at 7 and 8 pictures.

Discussion

This isn't the most scientific experiment and there is certainly several opportunities for bias to occur in the data results. A few possible flaws are as follows:

It is possible that men and women who are perceived at being better looking may be more comfortable displaying more pictures of themselves. This would produce bias in the data as better looking people who display more pictures would naturally receive a higher number of favorites just off of looks alone.

The range of # times favorited in the women's data is much greater than that of the men's data. Some women's profiles swing into the triple digits with the highest having over 500 favorites. These wild upswings for some women will have an impact on the average for those particular picture groups. This would explain for the big spikes in the graph.

Conclusion

There appears to be a positive correlation between number of profile pictures displayed and attraction level though certainly not proven. Also, this only applies to an average profile, as it is clear that some profiles with many pictures may still be viewed as unattractive and profiles with few pictures could be seen as highly attractive.

I've added in the original Plenty of Fish data sets above, so if there is anyone else out there with a better statistics background who'd like to take a stab at analyzing the data let me know.

Anatomy of a Good PlentyofFish Email

2008-11-07T16:38:00.012-05:00

As most women on PlentyofFish will tell you, a large majority of the emails they receive are terrible. We even took a look at seven of these awful emails in the last post. We also found that, in our fake female reconnaissance profile that in less than two days, we received 60 email messages from men on the site. The sad news is that almost every single one of those emails were terrible. Out of sixty only one email caught my attention and would be considered good. Take a look:

Click to Enlarge

Not too bad in my opinion. It's not great, but I'd say it's in the top 1% of the rest of the garbage that flows into a female's inbox. Why do I think it's good?

The subject line, it's true, is simple, unique and makes me want to open the message. By saying, "it's true," it makes me curious as to what he's talking about. Much better than the ever popularly lame: hi, hey, hello, etc.
There are no spelling or grammar mistakes. Nor are there any shorthand phrases, like replacing you for U, or other nonsense.
He isn't putting her up on a pedestal by giving her unconditional praise. Instead he opts for his you're adorable opener. This works as a nice little compliment without going overboard
The next line: but my mum always warned me about rockstar girls; works great as a disqualifying tactic, as well as being a cute way to flirt with her.
He shows that he actually read the profile by mentioning the Karaoke thing. In the profile, I wrote that this girl loves singing and going to Karaoke. This guy picked up on that and fed it right back. Also, he is setting the groundwork for a future date possibility.
Finally, he mentions indirectly that he's away traveling. We don't know why, but it could mean that he likes to travel, which most women find attractive or that he is traveling on business, which means he probably has a good career.

Though many of these aspects may seem simple and subtle to many men out there, it was executed extremely well in my opinion. It's intriguing, it's simple, it's flirty, it displays high value and it leaves us wanting to reply. This is exactly what a first email should entail.

Of course, this is coming from a man's opinion, I'd like to know what you ladies think and how would you respond if you received this email message on the PlentyofFish dating site or other online dating site?

7 Awful Plenty of Fish Email Messages from Men

2008-11-02T14:43:00.009-05:00

In an earlier post we discussed how awful many of the subject lines were in messages sent by men to our reconnaissance female profile. In this article, we will look at and analyze some of the Plenty of Fish dating messages from the men on the site. Lets take a look:

PoF Email #1 - Low Self-Esteem Guy

So this guy sends an email with a simple, hi, and nothing of substance in the message body. The worst part is that he states, "I know I have no chance..." If you knew you didn't have a chance why did you send the message? It is a dating site after all. Unless, perhaps you are looking for someone to give you pity or feel sorry for you. If that's the angle, then I'm sorry to bust your bubble, because it is simply sad and pathetic.

PoF Email #2 - Put Her on a Pedestal Guy

Listen, it's ok to give sincere compliments to women, however it's not ok to put her up on a pedestal and shower her with praise in a lame attempt to somehow attract her. In fact, you are doing the opposite, you are pushing her away. You simply are displaying how inferior you are by raising her value and lowering yours at the same time.

Ever heard the phrase: women like a challenge? Well, it's true and when you put her high up on a pedestal in your very first interaction with her, then you are not being challenging at all.

PoF Email #3 - The One Word Wonder

This type of message just baffles me. One word and a smiley face. Come on dude... you have to put in at least a little effort if you're going to expect a girl to keep from hitting the delete button the instant this hits her inbox.

POF Email #4 - Dr. Showoff

This guy might as well have said, "Hi, I'm a doctor... want to sleep with me now?"

Though it is important to display that you are a high value alpha male, such a blatant attempt to brag or showoff isn't attractive. He could have easily showed he was a doctor by being indirect in his approach, mentioning it as a passing thought without putting all the emphasis of his message on being a doctor.

POF Email #5 - Lame Pathetic Guy

This guy is similar to Pussy on a Pedestal Guy except far more lame and pathetic.

POF Email #6 - Retarded Guy

Listen, if you can't even put together a proper sentence, how do you expect anyone to find you attractive. Intelligence is an attractive quality in anyone and displaying it in a simple message to someone you are trying to attract will better your odds. Conversely, sending a message that looks like a dictionary puked on the screen is enough grounds to hit the delete button.

PoF Email #7 - Super Direct Guy

[click to enlarge]

I'll give this guy a fraction of credit as he has the balls to be honest and direct, however, this is certainly not the way to swoop a woman off her feet.

First, he doesn't bother using complete words, opting for U instead of You, etc. Second, he starts by putting the girl up on a pedestal right off the bat by calling her, very very very sexy. Third, he decides to throw in a sexual line about being on his knees for her. Fourth, he apologizes for his previous statements and finally gives out his phone number asking her to call him... sigh...

There are so many things wrong with this I'm not sure where to start. First, it should be obvious to anyone that if you want to display at least basic intelligence then you should probably attempt to use proper grammar. Second, when you put a girl up on a pedestal you are automatically lowering your own value. In essence, you are telling her that you are not even worth her time.

Third, telling her that you want to do sexual things to her in the first email is wayyy to direct for most women. Granted, I do believe in the direct approach in real life, but online and in this manner is going overboard. Fourth, if you are going to be that direct, why apologize for it? If the direct approach even had a chance of succeeding, you would have nullified it by apologizing. If you were truly sorry, you wouldn't have said it in the first place.

Finally, he gives his number out to a complete stranger on the first email. Dude?! How do you know this chick isn't really a guy posing as a chick? Well, it is. I now have your number and could easily prank call you and tell you how much you suck at online dating:)

Conclusion

Almost all the guys had terrible spelling and grammar, displaying low intelligence.
Most of the messages focused on complimenting the woman on her looks rather than writing about the many interests and content within that woman's profile.
Most of the guys put her up on a pedestal when there was really no basis for doing so.
Most of the guys had one sentence messages that were not unique in anyway and were not worth the woman's time.

Out of the 60 email messages that I received during this experiment, all of them encompassed the same or similar traits as the seven guys above, except for one. Yes, only one guy out of 60 managed to write a good solid attractive message. In the next post we will examine this one message and the qualities that makes it a good Plenty of Fish dating email message.

Increase in Promiscuous Girls Online

2008-10-28T11:13:00.016-04:00

PlentyofFish.com has recently released a press release which states that the promiscuity in the women on the site has doubled since 2004. According to their site's statistics, 18% of it's female dating population have selected the "intimate encounter" option in their profiles, up from 9% four years ago.

So what does this mean for the men on the site?

You'd think that an increase in promiscuity of the women on the site would mean an increase in guys getting more action. However, in my opinion, these numbers are not reliable and will likely not have any significant impact on a guy's attempt to get laid from the Plenty of Fish dating site. There are two reasons why I feel this is insignificant:

1. Increase of Bait and Switch Profiles

We've all seen these before. Profiles of beautiful women who message you out of the clear blue, proclaiming their interest in you, except that they only communicate through another paid dating site which you would need to sign up for if you want to talk to them. Seriously, I can't believe there are guys that fall for this stuff.

Because Plenty of Fish is now the top online dating site in the world, with over 10 million users, and free, it is only natural that there would be an increase of these fake bait and switch profiles. The larger the market share, the larger the opportunity for spammers to take advantage of that market.

2. Online Promiscuity Increases Selectivity

Lets suppose that this increase in promiscuity is real and that there are in fact women online that are simply out to have sex. If this were the case, then I would think it'd be even harder for the average man on Plenty of Fish to attract these types of women. Why? Selectivity.

We already know that the odds in online dating are strongly skewed in favor of women. Well, this is even more true for women who are looking for "intimate encounters." These girls will get way more attention then a girl looking for normal dates. Thus, the competition is higher and their standards are likely higher as well.

In this regard, an average looking woman in pursuit of an intimate encounter will likely only pursue the highest quality, best looking men on the site. This means, that your average guy doesn't even come close to having a shot with these women.

In the end, I don't think this changes the online dating game. In reality, the only reason for PlentyofFish to send out this press release is to attract more men to the site who believe they have a chance at some random play.

YouTube PlentyofFish Dating Rant

2008-10-23T20:59:00.011-04:00

I just found this video on YouTube of a guy ranting about his frustrations with the PlentyofFish dating site. He basically bitches and moans about the things that women do, which is not fair for him. I'll let you watch the video first and then I'll give my commentary and analysis afterward:

Did you watch it? Notice how this guys is completely frustrated by his attempts at online dating? I'm not surprised, he is a typical guy on the site and is going about it all wrong. He gripes about three things in the video and I'd like to address all of them and break it down.

Girls Not Revealing Their Correct 'Body Type'

This is to be expected on any dating site not just on Plenty of Fish. He basically accuses larger obese women of putting themselves in the wrong categories. This does happen quite often and not just with women. Men fudge their statistics too, particularly the height category. Essentially everyone nudges their personal traits to be more favorable, after all, they are trying to attract mates as best they can.

So, you can't stop women from fudging their profiles, but you can screen them easily if you know what to look for. For example, if she only has head shots in all of her pictures or if she put's "I'd rather not say" in the body type category, then there's a good chance that she is larger and you just move on (assuming you're not attracted to larger women of course).

Who's Who?

His second gripe is regarding girls who put up pictures of themselves with another girl or a bunch of other girls. I somewhat agree with him here. It is hard to tell who is the owner of the profile if the only pictures they show are group shots. However, there is a rule on the Plenty of Fish dating site that says your main picture should be a head shot of just you. So, assuming that rule is enforced then you should be able to tell the face behind the profile.

Helloooooo

The main reason I wanted to show this video is because this guy's last gripe is EXACTLY what I talked about in my last post about subject lines. He complains that a girl chewed him out because all he did was send her a message saying, "Hello."

From the experiment I ran in the last post, we saw that in the female profile, 39 out of 60 emails had subject lines that simply read: hello, hi or hey. With that many guys sending you crappy messages that just say 'hello', it's not hard for me to imagine a girl flipping out on a random dude every now and then. It's kind of like listening to kids in the back of the car, constantly asking, "are we there yet?" Eventually, one of the parents will snap and tell those little ankle bitters to shut the f#@k up.

Plenty of Fish Subject Lines that really SUCK!

2008-10-14T16:18:00.033-04:00

We know that online dating is very much lopsided towards women. Women tend to get a significantly higher amount of emails/messages to them then guys receive from women. For example, it's not uncommon for an attractive woman to receive 50-100 emails a day versus maybe one to two, for a guy of equal attractiveness.

I'm sure of this because I have seen the dark side my friends. Yes, I created an experimental fake profile of a woman on the Plenty of Fish dating site, and what I saw shocked me.

Let's take a look at what the "other side" sees.

[WARNING: a few days after doing this, I had both my personal real account and my experiment account deleted. The PlentyofFish system seems to have several methods for detecting duplicate accounts, so you may not want to try this at home]

Not long after getting the profile setup by loading up a few pictures of a female I grabbed from another site and writing a quick generic description, I was quickly swarmed by dudes who wanted to IM me. Seriously, the little boxes were popping up every five seconds. This annoyed me to no end, so I quickly disabled the IM feature.

I let the account sit for about a day and a half and this is what I got:

In a little over a day, I received three pages of emails from different guys. That's approximately 60 emails total! This is pretty insane considering that the woman was of average looks and my own personal (male) profile barely gets one or two emails in a month, let alone every few minutes as this account did.

So one thing we can take away from this little experiment is that, if you are a guy, you have A LOT of competition for PlentyofFish dating. Not exactly a comforting thought is it?

But Wait!

It does gets better. After further analysis, the experiment showed that despite a tremendous amount of competition, a large majority of those guys, like 95% of them, are pathetic when it comes to online dating. Thus the competition is also weak.

The most notable weakness is the lack of any thought into how they initiate contact with a female on Plenty of Fish. If you look at the above screen shot again you'll notice that a large number of subject lines are simply lines like this: "Hey", "Hey there", "Hello" or "Hi."

A quick count through all of the subject lines gives me a total of 39 guys out of 60 who sent an email with some variation of "Hi" in the subject line. That's 65%! On top of that, the remainder subject lines were either really lame, rude or vulgar.

Now lets take a second and put ourselves in the shoes of this woman. If you are a busy attractive female and are receiving 60 emails a day from random men, whose email are you more likely to open? The ones that all say the same thing in the subject line or that one message with something clever, intriguing or at least different than a simple "Hey"?

Keep this in mind, as the next post about POF email messages, will examine the body of the messages that were sent to the experimental account and trust me, they're not pretty...

3 Ways to Increase Your Plenty of Fish Profile Visibility

2008-07-13T16:18:00.009-04:00

One of the more efficient Plenty of Fish dating methods I talk about is sending messages to those people who are already attracted to you. Another efficient way of getting dates is simply letting people message you first. Using these two techniques, assuming you've set up your profile properly, you will save yourself a ton of time trying find potential dates. However, there is one drawback to this method, it only works if a high volume of potential dates find your profile.

Based on the need to get your profile viewed by as many potential dates as possible, there are three things you can do to significantly increase traffic to your Plenty of Fish dating profile:

1. Main Profile Picture - Your primary profile picture is very important because this is what is shown when people do a search and is also shown randomly in the picture bar on the website. So, obviously you want a very good profile picture that will draw people to click on it. Also, if you set your picture setting to allow people to rank it, then you will get additional exposure from people using the ranking feature.

2. Interests - There is a section in your profile which allows you to list all of your hobbies and interests. It's important to realize that when this section is displayed in your profile, you can click on the linked interest and it will take you to a page listing other people with the same interest. So, if you list out as many of your interests as possible, you are also increasing the chances of other people clicking through to your profile.

3. Participate in the Forums - This one is often overlooked and is also an excellent way to increase traffic to your profile. If you go into the Forums you will notice that in each thread, in the author section of a post, there is a link to view that poster's profile. So, as you may have figured out, the more you post to the forums the more traffic you'll get. This is by far one of the biggest traffic generators, as it is not uncommon for many forum threads to have over a thousand views. Even if only 10% those clicked through to your profile, you're still getting 100 extra visits simply from posting to one thread. Imagine how much traffic you'd get from posting to the forums on a regular basis!

With these three methods of generating traffic to your profile, you can massively increase your Plenty of Fish dating prospects.

How To Move Your Plenty of Fish Dates Off-line

2008-07-13T15:26:00.007-04:00

While the allure of browsing through thousands of potential dates and creating online connections is addicting, there is a time when you want to stop using the PlentyofFish dating site and actually meet people in real life for real dates. Lets face it, you didn't get into online dating for a pen pal, you did it to find someone you can actually hang out with in person!

Unfortunately, a lot of people fall into the trap of an endless chain of back and forth messaging. This is not good, because the more messages that get exchanged before meeting in person, then the less likely it is you will meet that person. It seems counter intuitive, but for the most part, it's true. The reason this happens is because as people continue exchanging messages, their expectations of that person increases and their anxiety of meeting them in real life also increases. Thus making people nervous and hesitant about meeting off-line.

What you want to do is exchange enough messages that you realize both people are interested in each other and that's it. There's no point in telling someone your life story through email when you can do it in real life on a date. It also makes the date easier because you will have more to talk about. So, to make the process more efficient and increase your number of "real life" dates, then it's probably best to keep your emails to less than five interactions before proposing to meet up. Any more than 10 interactions and you've got yourself a pen pal, either push for the date or cut your losses.

The ideal number of online interactions to have is about three to four email exchanges.

The first email is simply a 'bait and hook' to get the other person interested
The second email is going to be playful and display some of your value
The third email will need to qualify the other person, basically a challenge that gives them the perception that they are chasing you
The fourth email you simply state that the two of you would have much more fun in real life, so lets go grab a coffee, beer, whatever your first date idea is.

You always want to be moving the interactions forward, towards the goal of a date. If you're not moving towards this goal then you are wasting your time. Again, Plenty of Fish dating is not meant to waste your time, used properly it can be quite effective for getting many dates...in real life!!

How To Increase Your Plenty of Fish Dating Success

2008-07-13T14:42:00.006-04:00

What if I told you that there was a simple easy way to get almost a 100% response rate from people you message on the PlentyofFish dating site? Well there is. In fact there are two seldom used, yet powerful features that can drastically increase your dating success.

Many people, when dating online, will spend countless hours browsing for potential dates and sending out many messages. They'll waste tons of time only to receive very little in results. Perhaps they'll send out 10 messages and only receive one in return. You spend all your time chasing prospects that aren't interested in you. This is a terribly inefficient process.

It's much easier to simply send messages to those people you already know are attracted and interested in you. So, how do you find out who's already attracted to you? The two features I'm talking about are the "favorites" and the "fans" features. By simply looking at the information in these two sections you can basically send a message with almost guaranteed interest in return.

Favorites

At the bottom of every one's Plenty of Fish dating profile there is a link called "Add to favorites." The way it usually works is when someone is browsing through profiles and likes what they see, they often add that profile to their "favorites" list. If someone adds a person to their favorites list, we can only presume that the person is attracted or at least interested in that profile.

Now here's the good part, you can see which people have added you as a favorite. All you have to do is go into your favorites list and click on "find out who has selected you as a favorite" and you get a list of all the people that are interested in you.

Fans

Another great feature for finding successful dates is the fans feature. There is a picture ranking system on Plenty of Fish much like that of the original Hot or Not website which allows people to give pictures a rating from 1 to 10 (10 being the best). So, If you've selected your pictures to be ranked, which you should, then you can easily find the people who are already attracted to you.

You can do this by viewing your own profile and in the top right corner, on the 'rate my picture' line, there is a link called "fans." Simply click on this link and you will be given a list of all the people who rated you 7 or higher.

There you have it. Two simple and efficient methods for increasing your Plenty of Fish dating success.

How To Find Your Best Dating Profile Pictures

2008-07-12T18:42:00.013-04:00

There is a feature on the Plenty of Fish dating site that many people overlook. This one tool, used properly, can help you maximize the attractiveness of your profile pictures. What is this great tool? It's the picture rating system.

When you go into your 'images' section onto Plenty of Fish, there is a little check box next to each of your pictures that says "rate image." By checking this box you are allowing other people to give that picture a ranking from 1 to 10, with 10 being the most attractive. This one tool can help you create a profile that will vastly improve your chances of attracting more potential online dates.

Here's what you do:

Go into your 'images' section of your profile and check of the 'rate image' box next to each of your pictures.
The next step is easy, simply wait about a week, or enough time that enough people can rate your pictures.
Next go into your own profile and next to the "Rate My Picture" line in the top right corner, click on the 'Vote Breakdown' link
Once in your Vote Breakdown section, you will see some bar graphs with various statistic information
Naturally this shows you on average and by demographic how people find your pictures to be attractive or not
If you rate highly on a picture (7-10) then you know you have keeper, but if you rate low on a picture (below 5) then it's probably a good idea to get rid of it and swap it out for a new one.
Also, be sure to pay attention to the breakdown by demographic. Sometimes, you may rate low in one group and high in the other. If you aren't interested in the group that rated you low and are interested in the group that rated you high, then it is still beneficial to keep that picture even though your average overall rating is somewhere in the middle.

So, as you can see, this is a pretty powerful tool for your Plenty of Fish online dating profile. Using this one technique you can easily maximize the attractiveness of your overall profile.

5 Tips for Writing Your "About Me"

2008-07-12T16:50:00.012-04:00

When creating your Plenty of Fish dating profile, one tricky part is the "About me" section. This is usually difficult for any online dating site and often leaves us frustrated while attempting to describe ourselves in a way that will be attractive. Here are five tips for helping you to create the best "about me" section possible.

1. Spelling and Grammar

This should seem obvious but I often see Plenty of Fish profiles who write like third graders. Intelligence is an attractive quality in anyone and the best way to display this while dating online is through your writing. Be sure to use proper sentence structure, use paragraphs, and stay away from Internet acronyms like LOL. Also, there's no reason not to spell check these days. If you're using the Firefox browser, which you should be, make sure the automatic spell checker is activated. This will basically spell check everything you write on the Internet. Finally, when finished writing, make sure to re-read it a couple of times and edit as necessary.

2. Substance

Writing something of substance is the key to this whole thing. This is where you are going to display your personality. This is where you write about who you are. When describing yourself online you want to have some substance in your description. So, if you are passionate about something in your life, something that you love to do, this is where you want to talk about it. Try to stay away from making a list of hobbies and activities, those go in your "interests" section, so there's no need to repeat it. Stick to the things that you're passionate about and give some insight to your lifestyle, but just enough to leave some mystery as well.

3. Length

Having some substance in your "about me" section is key, but you also want to make sure it's not too short and not too long. If you only write two or three sentences, you are hardly providing enough information for someone to become attracted to you. Also, you don't want to write a book either. If it's too long, people won't have t he attention span to read the whole thing. You will also be giving away your entire life, which will leave nothing for you to talk about when you meet in real life. I find that about 200 to 300 words is probably enough to give your Plenty of Fish dating prospects enough information to make them intrigued but not overly indulged that they know your life story.

4. Who You Are Looking For

Many people like add what type of person they are looking for in this section. That's fine, but it's important not to be too restrictive when doing this. You don't want to disqualify or screen out potentially good dates. This seems to be a big issue in many a woman's profiles on Plenty of Fish. They'll often make a list of traits that they don't want, which will often unfairly screen out some potentially great guys. It's also makes you look picky and unrealistic. Instead of writing about what you don't want, write about qualities that you are more likely to be attracted to.

5. Positive, Interesting and Funny

As mentioned above, you always want to appear positive and not negative. People who are always on the bright side and stay positive are always more attractive then people who are negative. Also, try setting yourself apart from the crowd and be interesting. Check out your competition and take note of what types of things that everyone else is writing and then do something completely unique. Finally, having something humorous, that will make someone laugh or spit milk through their noses, will make you all the more memorable.

Stick to these tips when writing your "about me" section on your Plenty of Fish online dating profile and you'll be off to an excellent start in attracting quality dates.

Don't Be a Plenty of Fish Nice Guy

2008-07-12T14:48:00.009-04:00

Are you a nice guy and still getting terrible Plenty of Fish dating results? If you said "yes" then you are probably making the classic mistake that most nice guys make. You are putting the women you are trying to date online up on a pedestal. You are seeing these beautiful women online and worshiping them without even knowing who they are. This behavior may seem counter intuitive but you need to start putting your own needs higher than the women you are pursuing.

Perhaps you've been taught to always treat women with respect and to be a gentleman. That's good, you should always be gentleman when dating, but there is a difference between being a gentleman and being a supplicating push over. You can still respect women and place a high value on yourself at the same time.

It amazes me that when guys see a beautiful woman online, that they immediately put them up on a pedestal. Why? There's no reason to start worshiping the ground a woman walks on or to fall in love with her without having gotten to know her in person. You also come across as a stalker, which is obviously not attractive. A girl can't respect a guy who she can walk all over. It just doesn't work that way.

Some good examples of this topic can be found in the following thread on the Plenty of Fish dating forums. The women basically explain how they have guys sending messages claiming that they will treat them like goddesses or princesses. If this isn't your typical nice guy "putting the girl on pedestal" behavior, I don't know what is.

When you place more value on a woman by sending her these types of messages, you are stating right away that she is too good for you. So, if you're telling a woman that she is too good for you, what are the chances she is going to want a date with you? If we think about this logically, we realize that putting the woman up on a pedestal actually does far more damage then if you think about yourself and show these women that you are a high value man.

So, if your a nice guy and are involved with Plenty of Fish dating, please do these women a favor and stop being a push over.

7 Plenty of Fish Profile Picture Mistakes

2008-07-11T13:44:00.021-04:00

Creating a seductive profile online is probably one of the most important aspects to Plenty of Fish dating. Within the profile though, the pictures section is by far one of the most important and often most neglected feature. Here we will talk about some of the seven most over looked mistakes while posting pictures on your profile.

1. Not Having a Picture

This is pretty obvious and it's still surprising that there are people who think they are capable of attracting perfect strangers online without having a simple picture of themselves. Basically, if you don't have at least one picture, you are 100% wasting your time.

2. Pictures Without a Shirt

This applies mostly to the guys, however, I doubt women could get away with a topless picture on a legitimate dating site. Regardless, guys, keep your shirts on. Yes, we're all impressed with your big muscles, but posing/flexing for the camera is making you look like a tool and a douche bag. Amongst all my research and surveys with women who date online, I have yet to find one that thinks this is a good idea.

3. Not Having a Good Head Shot

This is actually a requirement for your main picture on the Plenty of Fish dating site. The reason is that people want to actually see a good close up of you, rather than a group shot or some stick figure standing in the distance. Even if you think you're ugly, having a good close up picture is good, because it shows you are honest. One of the biggest complaints in online dating is meeting people in real life that don't look like their pictures. These people who misrepresent themselves are obviously not getting a second date, which makes all that effort worthless in the end. Better to just stick with your ugly mug for the sake of efficiency.

4. Pictures With Your Ex Cropped Out

These are the pictures where you can clearly see the ex cropped out of the picture. I don't think this one is that big of a deal if you are really short on quality pictures. However, if you are serious about raking in the hotties on Plenty of Fish then why not just get some better pictures - don't you own a digital camera? Another thought is to simply leave the other person in the picture as means of social proof. Who cares if your ex is in the picture? I think it shows that you are open and don't care how people judge you. If you're worried about privacy for the other person then simply put a black bar across their eyes.

5. Self Portrait In the Mirror

You know what I'm talking about. The people who take their own picture with a cellphone while standing in front of the bathroom mirror. People please, this is just lame. First, it makes you look like you don't do anything, because you don't have any pictures of yourself and it makes you look like you don't have any friends. Do not do this.

6. Not Having Enough Pictures

Recently I did a little research where I browsed through 100 random male profiles and 100 random female profiles. For each profile, I recorded in a spreadsheet two sets of data: the number pictures shown and the number of times that profile was given "favorite" status. The results turned out to what I expected. Regardless of looks or written content, on average, the profiles with more pictures (6-8) had more favorites given to them. The profiles with less pictures (only 1 or 2) had little to no favorites given. Essentially, the two sets of data are directly proportional. So, we can conclude that the more pictures you show, the more interest you will receive in your online dating profile.

7. Not Diversifying Your Pictures

One observation I noticed in my research from number 6 is those profiles with 6 - 8 pictures, some did good while others did extremely well. The difference was that the pictures that were exceptional, had a diverse set of pictures. Conversely, the pictures that had 6 shots of the same thing only fared as well as profiles with 1 or 2 pictures.

A good example is one guy who had 8 pictures shown and was given favorite status by 130 women!! By far the highest number I've seen for a male dating profile. So what set his pictures apart from everyone else. He basically showed, through his pictures how awesome and exciting his life was. He had pictures of him doing the following: skydiving, riding a motorcycle, snowboarding, surfing, sitting by the fire in a camp setting, playing with his dogs, and one simple but clear head shot as his main picture. He barely had anything written in his profile either, but he didn't need to, he displayed his exciting life through visual proof!! Think about it folks.

Hopefully these seven tips of "what not to do" will help you avoid some common pitfalls for Plenty of Fish dating and other online dating services. If you have any to add please feel free to write it in the comments section.

Making First Contact on Plenty of Fish

2008-07-10T16:27:00.013-04:00

You have your Plenty of Fish dating profile setup perfectly and it's likely you are starting to attract a little bit of attention, but in order to ultimately utilize this site you'll need to make first contact. Aside from your profile, this is the second most important aspect of online dating. Unfortunately most people, especially guys, also mess this part up big time!

Why is this step so crucial? Because, your first contact is only meant to accomplish one thing only and any other message you try to convey will likely be futile. So what's the one thing you ask? Simple, all you want to accomplish with the first message is to get your prospect curious enough to look at your profile. It's a bait and hook maneuver. That's it!

The bait and hook is crucially important on the Plenty of Fish dating site. This is for multiple reasons. The big one being that, assuming you're a guy, the women you are contacting are receiving tons of messages each day. Most of the time they are getting the same old ridiculous emails over and over again. So the trick is to set yourself apart from everyone else with a short yet intriguing message.

Here's a few examples of what has been getting good responses for me:

Pick several things from your prospects "interests" list that you have in common and use the following type of message

Subject: Hmmm, that's interesting...
Body: You like [interest1] and [interest2]! How come we aren't best friends yet!?

That's it short sweet and simple. Remember you aren't trying to make the girl fall in love with you on the first email. Your only goal is to get her to read your message and get her to check out your Plenty of Fish dating profile.

Let's break down why this works.

The first thing we want to accomplish is to get her to click on your message in her already stuffed inbox. This accomplished with the subject line. By implying that there is something interesting, but not stating what it is, you are giving her a lot of intrigue. It's likely that she can't help but read your message right away.

Second, now that she is reading our message, we quickly show her that we have some things in common and then give her a "call to action" by asking her a question. By giving her a simple question to answer, it's more likely that she'll respond with something. It's also more likely that she'll check out your profile, which is key.

Now assuming you setup your profile correctly, it will already do a lot of the leg work for you.

So, in the next couple of posts will look at some examples of what not to do and some of the next steps to take for dating on Plenty of Fish.

How To Set up a Plenty of Fish Dating Profile

2008-07-02T16:05:00.009-04:00

The first and probably most important task for successful Plenty of Fish dating experiences is to set up a great profile. Unfortunately, most guys are too anxious to begin browsing for women that they don't put much thought into their profiles. This is a BIG mistake. Setting up an online dating profile in a way that is unique and attractive will make Plenty of Fish Dating much more efficient and effective.

In my personal profile, I decided to go with a technique that was pioneered by Race de Priest, who is an expert in the field of MySpace and Facebook seduction. One of Race's biggest techniques for getting women on MySpace is displaying one's fun adventurous personality through pictures and playful pieces of text. So, I figured if these techniques work so well on MySpace and Facebook (they do, I've tried them:) then why not adapt them for Plenty of Fish?!

Well, this is exactly what I did and within just a few hours of finishing my profile I had already gotten a few messages from several girls, all from simply creating a seductive profile! Here's how to do it:

First thing is picking a good headline. This is one of the first things that a woman will see when looking at your profile and it needs to have several different qualities all wrapped up into a single little phrase. It should be unique, related to your personality, mysterious, and fun.
Don't put things that include, "searching for", "looking for", "seeking", "nice guy", etc in your title or description. These types of things will make you look needy. The key is to look like you don't need online dating at all, you're simply there to try it out as another option and have fun.
Next are all the descriptive fields like height, hair color, body type, etc. This section should be pretty self explanatory but surprisingly a lot of people mess it up. You should make sure you tell the truth, especially when it comes to 'height' and 'body type.' There's no sense lying about this because when you do get a date then you'll only look like a liar and will have just wasted your time.
Also, never use the "prefer not to say" options because this will make you look like you're hiding something. The best profiles are those that are open about themselves and don't care what other people think.
The 'Profession' field is a little tricky. Unless you have a really cool job, I prefer to have fun with this part and make up something totally outrageous. For example, Vice President of Rock or Zombie Slayer. I think it's ok to make something up here so long as it is blatantly obvious that it's not true. And if someone really wants to know you're profession then they can simply ask.
You also want to have some fun with the 'Interests' section. Try not to just list out a lot typical average activities that most guys do. List things that are unique, adventurous and funny. Also, if you have any cool hobbies or unique talents, this is the place to put them.
Next is the description and first date sections. Again, stay away from the typical boring stuff. Don't write an entire novel either, just keep it short and simple but still describing how much of a fun guy you are.
Finally, the best and most important for last, pictures! I can't stress this enough people. The more quality pictures you upload the more responses you will get. It's as simple as that. Plenty of Fish allows you to upload a maximum of 8 pictures. I recommend using the maximum amount. Go through your pics and get eight of your best. Try to diversify them too, one good head shot for the main pic, a good body shot, and then the rest showing you engaged in fun adventurous activities. Please guys, do not overlook this part, it is probably the most critical part of the whole system.
And one last note on the pictures, don't use ones with your shirt off, it makes you look like a try hard and a showoff, regardless of how big your muscles are.

So, those are some of the basics of this particular Plenty of Fish dating technique that I'm using. Again, I'm still experimenting with this as it is an adaptation on Race de Priest's MySpace seduction system, but so far it seems to be working quite well. I'll keep you guys posted on further developments and any new tips I come across while seducing the women of Plenty of Fish.

Plenty of Fish Dating Statistics

2008-06-30T22:54:00.005-04:00

Before venturing off into the great unknown of Plenty of Fish dating, I first want to take a look at some of the current online dating statistics for this particular site.

This first thing I want to highlight is the number of users on Plenty of Fish. By taking a look at Google trends and comparing it with the other top online dating sites, we can see that Plenty of Fish is the second most visited dating site behind Match.com.

So, because POF is the second largest online dating site, we can only assume that size of our potential dating pool will be quite significant. This is important because as we continue to experiment and refine our dating system, we are going to need to interact with a large quantity of potential dates.

Second, if we look at the registration page for Plenty of Fish, you'll notice that they cite two interesting statistics which you can view in screen shot below:

Largest Dating site in the world generating over 300,000 relationships a year, larger than all other free dating services combined.

49% of women who leave plentyoffish.com found their boyfriend here. Love really IS just a click away.

The first statistic of being the largest dating site in the world conflicts with the Google trends data, but it's difficult to say how accurate either is. One thing is for sure though, Plenty of Fish has A LOT of users!

The second statistic cited is also interesting. I'm not sure how they got this number, I'm assuming through some type of survey, but if it is true than it is quite impressive. 49% of women, almost half, find a boyfriend through Plenty of Fish. That's pretty damn good if you ask me. Although, I'd be much more impressed if the success rate for men were that high. However, for some reason this number is not shown, but I'm guessing it's much lower.

So as we can see we're not messing around with some rinky dink dating site. The pool from which to draw dates from are in the millions. Certainly enough women that we can essentially screw up several hundred times and not be concerned about our prospects for dating on Plenty of Fish.

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2008-06-02T22:06:00.004-04:00

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Welcome to Plenty of Fish Dating Tips

2008-06-01T14:43:00.006-04:00

There has been a lot of talk about PlentyofFish.com lately that basically denounces the service as a terrible online dating site for meeting other people. Despite being free and one of the largest online dating sites in the world, the Plenty of Fish dating site gets a pretty bad rap. There a few reasons for this:

Because it's free, there tends to be a lot of users who aren't active on the site
Men complain about not getting responses from any of the women they try to contact
Women complain of the scarcity of quality men on the site

Now I agree that PlentyofFish.com may not be as useful as a paid service like Match.com or eHarmony but given the sheer size of PoF, it makes me wonder if this tremendous resource could be used effectively. Well, that's what this site is going to be about.

My observations has shown that the quality of Men and their online dating strategies are extremely poor, as in Beta male poor. Thus, if a guy can come up with a killer method for dating on Plenty of Fish, then that guy would truly clean house.

In addition, if this were to become a resource to help increase the quality of even more men who use the site, then the site's overall quality will also increase. If women know that they can snag a decent man on PoF then that will help spread positive reviews about the site and drive more quality women and men to it.

So, over the course of this blog, I will be testing out different online dating profile techniques, giving my analysis, making observations, running experiments, giving proven tips, and hopefully writing about all the dates I will go on:)

This is a journey and hope you all enjoy it.